In the most recent episode of Digital Campus, Dan and I interviewed Stan Katz (Princeton) about his role in promoting digital history over the past 20 (yes, 20) years. Tom couldn’t join us for the episode because he was at home with the Scheinfeldt family’s new baby. I suppose that qualifies as an excuse. If it seems to you that digital history is too new to have a history, then you need to listen to this episode of Digital Campus. Stan will disabuse you of the notion that what we’re up to is a very recent thing…he was pushing historians to realize that a computer is not a typewriter more than a decade ago and, as that paper reveals, his efforts on behalf of digital history go back even further. For instance, if you like accessing the American Historical Review online, thank Stan. He was the AHA vice president for research who pushed the AHR to move to a digital format. So give the podcast a listen and you’ll even learn how accessing Facebook can lower your GPA.
Posts Tagged ‘Digital Media’
Stan Katz Knows
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009Pirates on YouTube
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009In what I hope will be my last post on my hoax course (because the criticisms from certain quarters have become repetitive), I want to pass along a link to a YouTube video about our course produced by Jerry Griffith, a local videographer and spouse of one of our grad students here at Mason. The video is a nice, short summary of what happened in the course and how the students responded.
I Hate It When This Happens
Thursday, February 12th, 2009Okay, so maybe I was wrong about the good folks at Texas A&M. Maybe I can convince the powers that be here at Mason that we need to implement the A&M reward system retroactive to last semester. If so, the result of my student evaluations for Lying About the Past would almost certainly pay for my summer vacation. Why did I write that last post?
On a more serious note, given the minor controversy that has swirled around my hoax course, I thought that posting a few of the student comments on the end of semester evaluations might be worthwhile. And, for the record, that course recorded my first 5.0 rating on a 5 point scale in 13 years of undergraduate teaching. Here’s what the students who wrote comments had to say:
- I learned a lot from the class because of how hands-on it was. The research was all relevant and the end product was all self-determined. Mills directed our activity in that he guided us instead of dictating as in most classes, and our ability to make our own decisions otherwise was great.
- The course pushed me, which is always good. I learned to think critically about the impact of media past and present on our daily lives and views.
- The creation of the hoax was the most effective tool for learning because it let us have fun with something we do on a regular basis.
- You really taught us to look at sources and give them a serious eye. Without this class I wouldn’t have learned how to blog or look at every source for credibility.
- Best class I ever took here.
- Having to research really helped me learn history and also having to invent every aspect of the project was great.
- This course was so fun–wonderfully hands-on and a great learning opportunity. It was so hard creating history instead of just studying and it really helped me figure out how hoaxes are created.
- This was the best class I’ve ever taken. The readings were great. The project turned out to be a lot of fun, regardless of the amount of stress it created.
- The analytical approach to studying history and various sources has helped me in other classes. Studying how not to go about it was extremely helpful.
Digital Media and Student Learning
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009[NB: This post originally appeared in the blog hist.net.]
The January issue of Academic Commons highlights the results of several years of research on the intersections between digital media and student learning in the humanities and social sciences. The various essays presented in this issue — and a second issue due out in February — are drawn from the work of participants in the Visible Knowledge Project based at Georgetown University. Focusing on a variety of issues related to the ways that digital media are transforming student learning and the relationship between teaching and learning, the strength of the work presented here is that it is (mostly) drawn from evidence, rather than anecdote. Too often claims about teaching or gains in student learning are made entirely from a complete or almost complete lack of evidence. The essays in these two issues offer a pleasant corrective to this tendency.